


Self-Destruct

by pinkmoon



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Friendship/Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Relationship(s), Self-Destructive Behavior, Slow Build, being too smart for your own good, letter correspondence, some minor descriptions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 01:48:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1880493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkmoon/pseuds/pinkmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He learns how to never be wrong. He learns how to be indispensable. He realizes it makes him unstoppable.</p><p>Newton Geiszler is one tick away from self-destructing for the rest of his life."</p><p>A character study of Newt's lifetime of risky behavior and predilection for taking risks of the "rock star" sort. (Spanning many years, continents, arguments, and accidents, but landing, unexpectedly, in a happy ending.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self-Destruct

There’s something insatiable inside of Newt that would terrify him if it didn’t delight him so deeply.

He feels it for the first time when he stands up in class and demands that the lecturing teacher is _wrong, wrong, wrong! You idiot! You stupid idiot!_ He sits in the principal’s office and they argue about suspending him, but it turns out the teacher _was_ wrong, and instead he skips a grade. Newt grins at the floor so hard he feels like his face might split. He was right. He misbehaved but he was _right._

His uncle bakes him a ‘congratulations’ cake.

He learns how to never be wrong. He learns how to be indispensable. He realizes it makes him unstoppable.

Newton Geiszler is one tick away from self-destructing for the rest of his life.

\---

Newt is twenty, and he’s already close to finishing his fifth Master’s degree at MIT. He has a teaching position. He has his name in textbooks. He has students knocking down his door, veritably brawling for positions in his class. 

Newt has admirers. But he doesn’t have friends.

They call him _wunderkind_ , students and colleagues alike. Students five, six years his elder muss up his purposefully disarrayed hair and throw companionable arms around his shoulders, tucking him close against their sides and shaking him. They’re bigger than he is. Everyone is.

Newt tries to flirt with the women on campus, and though he can see them laughing at him in his periphery, he still tries, still wants to woo, wants to _be_ wooed, wants to be part of it. Whatever _it_ is.

He falls head over heels with a graduate student, Frank Baker. Frank is handsome and tall and plays bass, and Newt is in deeply, irrevocably in love. Frank whispers dirty things in Newt’s ear and taunts, “wouldn’t you like to try that, wunderkind?” and Newt chokes back, “god, yes,” and tries it, tries anything Frank says. By the time Frank loses interest in Newt, commands he stop following him around “like a kicked puppy, you’re _a teacher_ for god’s sake,” Newt feels so lonely, so used, so utterly idiotic. He tries to drink to forget about it, but he can’t even get into the local bars at his age.

He ingratiates himself further into anyone who will take him.

“You’re coming to the end of the year bash at Phi Beta tonight, right, wunderkind?”

Of course Newt is going. Newt will drink whatever they tell him to drink. He’ll solve complex equations in dry erase markers on their windows while stoned out of his mind, just to hear everyone applaud when he comes to the end of a particularly difficult proof. He’ll flirt with anyone – everyone – who gives him attention, but he’ll still go home alone.

He meanders through party after party. Once, he hears two students – two of _his_ students – standing on the fire escape outside an open window.

“I dare you to jump, Amir.”

“Fuck you,” the other man laughs back good-naturedly. “I’d die.”

“You wouldn’t die.”

“I’d break something, that’s for damn sure. No one in their right mind would jump off this fucking thing, dude.”

“Are you kidding me?” the first student roars, “ _Wunderkind_ would do it in a heartbeat! All you have to do is ask.”

And Newt would. If there were people there to watch him, to goad him, to applaud him, _he would._

\---

It’s 2013, and the world is ending. Newt drafts fifteen separate letters to the foremost scientific minds across the globe regarding Trespasser's attack. He slaves over the messages, each one different, each one tailored to their area of expertise.

 

_...the head-plate is remarkably similar to the genus..._

 

_...some sort of portal, or rift..._

 

_...extraterrestrial, or an evolutionary mutation..._

 

He doesn't receive a single response.

Furiously, Newt sends follow-up missives.

 

_...in case my previous letter did not reach its intended destination..._

 

_...no reason to believe this is an isolated event..._

 

_...I can be reached any time..._

Similar radio-silence on all fronts, although Newt does spot one of the biologists on TV spouting off  _Newt's_  head-plate theory. Newt throws every dish he owns out his third-story window as he shouts himself hoarse.

His third bouts of letters are far less politely worded.

It takes two weeks, but he finally receives a letter in return, postmarked from Cambridge. The custom-printed return address on the envelope reads Lars Gottlieb. Hands shaking, Newton retreats into his door room and tears it open. Inside is a handwritten letter in a precise, angular hand.

It isn't from Lars Gottlieb.

It's from his son.

 _Doctor Geiszler_ , it is addressed.

 _Forgive me, but while visiting home from University, I seem to have intercepted your letter intended for my father, Lars Gottlieb. I am chagrined to admit that your previous missives were rather rudely discarded by my father (and erstwhile scientific collaborator), and I hope you are not too offended that I am replying in his stead. Attached are my credentials, though I'm not sure what exactly denotes someone as "qualified" to deal with this nightmarish monstrosity. At least you can be assured that what I have, above all else, is a keen interest._  

_Before I begin, I must add, anyone who has the gall to address my father as a "pompous, exclusionary ass" certainly garners my attention, though I will admit I am glad I was able to steal this letter away before it ever fell into his hands. Genius he may possess, but a sense of humor he does not._

Newt laughs out loud, inexplicable tears stinging his eyes. He has no idea why he's crying, but it feels sharp, and immediate, and _vital_. He can't remember the last time he's cried like this, but he doesn't want it to stop just yet. He feels full of relief and passion and, what -- hope? Something like hope.

He finishes the letter and immediately sits down to draft a response. 

\---

Newt drinks so many cups of coffee that his hands go numb and twitch uncontrollably and he can’t breathe. He has to go to the E.R and the nurses scoff at him behind his back and he holds up a (shaky) middle finger when they aren’t looking. They tell him he shouldn’t ingest caffeine again for weeks – _years_ maybe. He doesn’t listen. He picks up black coffee on his way home as the sun rises and it tastes all the sweeter.

Hermann writes, a week later, “Please don’t off yourself over something as idiotic as a second caffeine overdose. How utterly mundane of you, Doctor Geiszler. I thought you at least _marginally_ wiser than that. 

And that’s the only thing that keeps Newt away from the stuff for a while.

\---

Clawhook attacks Los Angeles in the summer of 2019. It’s an unnaturally cool day in Lima, where Newton is stationed with the PPDC, and he has been huddled in front of his TV all day, furiously taking notes. He circles “bioluminescence???” three times in the margin of his notebook and fantasizes about climbing right into Clawhook’s mouth to scrape a sample. Night falls, taking Newt entirely by surprise, so he treks out to a local bar in the evening and downs three – four – too many beers. He is terrified. He is giddily planning his new tattoo. He is ecstatic, nerves all on fire, knowing that more Kaiju are coming and he’s going to figure them out. He hasn’t heard from Hermann yet, even though he knows his miles and miles from where Clawhook struck, but still wouldn’t know what to do if he were dead. His head is swimming.

He orders a fourth beer. Fifth? He orders another beer.

“What the hell, man,” a gruff voice beside him huffs. “Are you shitting me? You got that _thing_ tattooed on you permanently?”

Newt glances down at Trespasser, splayed across his right bicep. Newt flexes and grins at the man.

“Trespasser? Yeah, man, he’s the original.”

The man’s gaze turns steely. 

“You think it’s funny?” he seethes, seizing Newt by the arm with surprising force. “I have family who _died_ in that attack.”

Newton’s heart rate spikes and he gets that feeling again, that feeling like driving to the ER on that caffeine high and almost running his car off the road, that feeling like watching Trespasser snap through suspension wires on the Golden Gate bridge like they were floss.

The man shakes Newt roughly, pushing his face in close. 

“Did you hear what I said,” he bristles, “or is this _funny_ to you, too?”

Newt can’t help it. He laughs. His stomach burns with some sick sort of lust and he feels alive.

“Fuck you, man,” Newt leers, purposefully. It’s all a test. A hypothesis that needs proof. A measure of the push-and-pull [contact forces vs action-at-a-distance], with these assumed instigators involved [alcohol, stress, agitation] weighed against [environment, peer pressure, morality] –

The man pulls him off his barstool and into a dark corner of the bar.

“I’m gonna fuck you up,” the man hisses in Newt’s ear, and the sickest part of Newton hopes he’ll take him in the back and fuck him, hard, relentless, but it seems much clearer there’s a different intent to harm here. 

Maybe he won’t tell Hermann, tucked safely away in Vladivostok.

\---

Hermann ends up transferred to the Lima Shatterdome later that summer. Newt makes a big show of rolling his eyes and bemoaning having to work alongside the _human calculator_.

“We met in 2017”, Newt tells his interns, prepping them for the arrival of _Herr Gottlieb_ , “We didn’t get along.” This is true. “We keep in touch, occasionally.” This is not true. Newt has four unread emails from the man waiting currently in his inbox. Hermann, likely, has the same amount awaiting him 

“He’s like… like… like an icebox personified. I can’t believe he’s coming _here_ ,” Newt laments, overdramatically.

But all the same he’s there waiting for Hermann the moment his helicopter lands in Lima. Hermann clambers out of the helicopter, clumsy and overdressed, and Newt’s chest swells with an emotion he can’t even begin to fathom.

“Look who’s finally decided to join us,” Newt shouts over the deafening whir. Hermann rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, wide, something like relief written all over his face.

They shake hands companionably and Newt helps take his luggage inside. The quiet respite is, expectedly, short.

The fighting begins, and it is _incessant._ People begin to gossip, wondering how they ever manage to get any work done at all. Lab techs begin quitting. The Marshal pleads with Vladivostok to _take Doctor Gottlieb back, for all our sakes._

Newt, for what it is worth, has never worked harder in his life. 

Hermann crosses over into Newt's side of the lab and shouts until he's red-faced and breathless, 

"You are a reckless, vain, self-serving excuse for an overgrown child!"

Newt licks his lips and smiles, predatory,

"Yeah? Tell me something I don't know."

They never work apart for the next five years.

\---

Rude, people call him. Rash. Loud. Selfish. Insensitive. 

But  _goddamn_  if he doesn't get results.

It doesn't hurt that he is the foremost (and, oftentimes,  _only_ ) xenobiologist working for the PPDC. People come and go: specialists, lab techs, interns, engineers, but as years go by it's a steady trickle out the door, and people aren't coming back.  

So Newt posits and invents and shouts and experiments, and what choice does the PPDC have but to listen? He asks for machinery, it is delivered to his lab the next day. He wants first pick of any and all Kaiju remains, they arrive, perfectly preserved, unless he's going out into the field to personally harvest them himself. In secret, he even storms into the Marshal's office and demands they cancel Hermann's upcoming transfer to Alaska. The Marshal wants to question, but thinks better of it. Hermann gets word that afternoon that he should cease packing his things.

Newt gets whatever he wants.

And Hermann is furious about it.

Newt doesn't make it easy on him, of course. He gloats and preens and teases, showing off his latest samples, latest technology, latest bruises and cuts in the name of science. Hermann glowers and sticks to his blackboards, which haven't been replaced or upgraded in seven years of work at the PPDC. Hermann is too frugal (or, perhaps, prideful) to even ask for a new computer console when the display starts to go on the fritz. Newt has to demand a new one, which mysteriously “ends up” on Hermann's desk one day. Hermann thinks it's a token of gratitude from the capable new Marshal, Pentecost. Newt bites the inside of his cheek.

Newt takes spectacular risks, and maybe it's that end-of-the-world desperation, but no one seems to stop him. 

So it comes at no surprise to anyone – not even Newt – that he nearly gets himself killed in 2020. It’s hot on the heels of the first dramatic funding cutback to the PPDC, and Newt is _furious_ , outraged beyond comprehension, so utterly blindsided by betrayal that he hardly even registers the way Hermann’s face pales whenever Doctor Lars Gottlieb flashes on television, extolling the virtues of the Wall of Life program.

Newt is alight with indignation and a deeply ingrained need to be right.

So he sneaks a Kaiju spinal column up onto the roof, away from the lab where Hermann would easily put a damper on this experiment. Newt knows the security cameras must have caught him as he hauled the impossibly large specimen onto the freight elevator, making little to no effort to be discreet. But if anyone spotted him, they made no move to stop him.

He doesn’t remember much further than adhering the electrodes along the spinal column and amping up the EMP on his machine like some sick joke out of _Spinal Tap_. The display goes haywire – _is it releasing EMP of its own?_ Newt thinks, just as there’s a blinding yellow light and a noise like a car crash. Debris, he remembers. The smell of smoke. The sun, above him, bearing down unforgivingly.

He wakes up in the hospital hours later, sluggish from painkillers. His chest is uncomfortably constricted, and his right arm is bandaged tight. Something above his left eye throbs incessantly. A nurse addresses him in short order, helps adjust his pillows, asks him questions that ring hollowly in his ears like she’s shouting across a vast canyon. Newt nods mindlessly, even though he has a thousand questions he’d like to ask, if only his mouth could move properly.

Hours go by, or at least the room grows dimmer around him. He begins to feel more like himself again as the haze of drugs and panic wears away. He bides his time by practicing how best to reason his actions to the Marshal for when he eventually gets called in for questioning.

Newt hears the distinctive _clomp-tap-clomp-tap_ of Hermann hurrying into the room and he steels himself, mentally preparing a handful of sardonic barbs and scientific retorts for Hermann’s inevitable resentment. But the look on Hermann’s face as he rounds the corner is not one of rage, but of sharp, immediate relief. 

“Doctor Geiszler,” he says, the words riding a shallow exhale of his breath. “You’re awake.”

“Hey,” Newt replies shortly, his voice like sandpaper. 

“How do you feel?” Hermann ventures politely, shifting his weight nervously as he rakes his eyes over Newt’s body as discreetly at possible, cataloging injuries. Newt waves Hermann into the chair at his bedside. 

Newt shifts to face him and consciously morphs the sharp, painful inhale of breath that catches in his chest into a mega-watt smile so bright that he intends to burn all the worry and disapproval and disdain right out of Hermann.

“Been better.”

“Yes, well, I’d imagine,” Hermann scoffs, “You know they removed a piece of shrapnel mere _centimeters_ from where it would have punctured a lung.”

“Guess I’ve got good aim,” Newt quips, as Hermann glowers, dangerously, over the rims of his glasses.

“This is no joke,” Hermann warns evenly. His calm, sedated disparagement only discomforts Newt more. What feels familiar – feels _right_ – is a shouting match, trading spur for spur. Newt wants that, craves it.

“No, you’re right,” Newt jibes. “My theories – my experiments – aren’t a joke. They’re important. And they’re _real_. And they’re gonna save all our asses someday. Unlike your hypotheticals and ideas and equations – ”

Hermann interrupts, forcefully, 

“Why not tell me what you were planning on trying?” 

“Because you’d stop me,” is Newt’s measured riposte.

“And with good reason!”

“I don’t know what planet you’re on _dude_ , but where I am it seems pretty damn clear that there isn’t time for stopping.”

Hermann gapes at him and swallows back a thinly veiled insult that Newt desperately wishes he could have heard.

“I would hope,” Hermann starts, voice tight, “that no matter the direness of the situation, your well-being wouldn’t factor into equation.”

“What about your well-being?” Newt seethes, jabbing Hermann, hard, in the chest. “Not eating or sleeping for days, popping pain medication like hard candy when you think I can’t see you –”

“That’s hardly the same,” Hermann splutters, shoving Newt’s hands away with force.

 _Yes,_ Newt thinks. _Yell at me. Push me. Please. Please._

“How is it any different?" 

“Because I have some modicum of self-control!” Hermann shouts and it feels good -  _so good_ – to see him tense up, face blotchy, thin hands shaking. A warm sense of familiarity pools in Newt’s gut, and it’s the first thing all day to shake away the cold drowsiness of the pain medication.

“I won’t sneak away to perform life-threatening experiments in secret. I wouldn’t ask for the technology to do so, and I certainly wouldn’t be _receiving_ it from the PPDC! It is preposterous that they engage you and propagate this destructive behavior!”

“What are you _jealous?_ Someone needs to do it,” is Newt’s measured reply.

“Yes, _someone_ ,” Hermann nearly keens with exasperation, “but why, always, incessantly, inadvisably, _you_?” 

Hermann pulls the glasses off his face clumsily and fixes Newt with a searing glare that is equal parts fury and – yes, Newt sees it, and Hermann knows Newt sees it – _love._

“So you'll have to forgive my incredulity, Doctor Geiszler, but it seems glaringly apparent to me that no one here would give a damn if you sacrificed your life in the 'name of science' and I won't allow it!"

“You don't get to 'allow' anything!” Newt shouts back, grabbing Hermann by the lapels and shaking him a bit too viciously. “It’s my life! These are  _my_  choices! And tough luck,  _bud_ , but you don't have any goddamn say in it!”

Their faces are so close he can smell Hermann's skin, breath: chalk, black tea, ammonia, sweat, disinfectant. They both swallow thickly, almost in unnerving unison.

“I fear you confuse dedication to a cause with unwavering dedication to a misguided ideology,” Hermann entreats gently. “Do not, Newton. Do _not._ ”

Newt’s head is spinning and he cannot reply. There is so much love in Hermann’s vitriol. He wonders if it has always been there.

“I implore this of you not as a colleague but as,” Hermann’s face flushes, his lips stutter over the word, “a friend.” 

Newt thinks about college. He thinks about starting off with the PPDC. He thinks about instigating strangers into fighting with him just so he can get that pins-and-needles feeling he gets all over when he screams at the top of his lungs. There is a clock that is ticking ever closer to another attack, another attack he can stop, _will_ stop, and he doesn’t want to feel this desperate and confused and sheltered and loved and scared –

 _Newt has admirers. But he doesn't have friends._  
  
Hermann is so close that Newt can feel the enticing heat of his body through his clothes, and something sits, scalding and seething, deep in Newt’s stomach. One thought burns bright behind his eyes, and he wants to say it, he does, it would feel so good to say, after all these years,  _"I wouldn't be able to do this without you"_  but instead he sneers,

“Maybe I'll have time for friends after I save the world.”

Hermann tries to hide his hurt as he limps, resolutely, silently, out the door.

Newt receives no further visitors for the duration of his hospital stay.

\---

It turns out the most hurtful thing Hermann ever says is, “I regret ever writing back to you, Doctor.”

 _Whatever,_  Newt thinks, stewing angrily as he cut-cut-cuts into a piece of Kaiju lung.  _I would still be here. Exactly here, where I am, kicking ass, the most brilliant fucking mind in my field, with or without you._

But Newt knows that isn't true.

\---

The next time Newt almost gets himself killed it’s 2024, and he’s built a makeshift pons out of certifiable garbage. He’s drifted with a fraction of a fast-decaying Kaiju brain and he feels like someone has split him open, jagged and reckless, and rearranged his organs. His brain feels red hot, aches and pulses, has been imprinted upon with memories no human should ever have.

He stumbles out of the Drift, but he’s not sure how. He feels feverish, faintly aware of his limbs seizing violently, but too far away to feel any sort of pain or fear.

He blinks up towards the light, eyes bleary, and when he blinks too hard, everything is tinged with an electric blue. 

Someone his holding him; fingers splayed firmly but gently around his neck. So Newt holds back, desperately, heaving wild, frantic breaths. He digs his spasming fingers into something solid – a wrist, fabric, a wild pulse beneath his fingers, the smell and warmth of something blessedly human.

Hermann.

He’s muttering nonsense into Newt’s ear that he can’t hear, or parse, or comprehend. He’s helping him to stand as best as the two of them can manage, both shuddering violently for entirely different reasons.

Hermann fetches a glass of water, but Newt promptly bleeds into it, rendering it utterly polluted. Hermann tips Newt’s head forward, offering up his handkerchief to halt the bleeding, and brushes kind, dexterous hands over the planes of Newton’s face.

“Can you hold that, Newton? Do you hear me? Can you hold that up to your nose, like this?”

Newt knows there are words to say in this situation, but he can’t access them. They’re locked up in a part of his brain he isn’t privy to just yet, but he can nod – which he does, jerkily – and he blinks his eyes rapidly. He takes the handkerchief in shaking hands and holds it up to his bleeding nostril.

“Good. That’s good, Newton.”

Newt wants to say something – anything – but he all he can manage is a strangled sounding croak. Hermann shushes him, low and gentle, and pushes matted hair away from Newt’s damp forehead.

“It is very important that I find someone to help you,” Hermann persists urgently, but his voice is so raw with emotion that it stirs up long-repressed feelings in Newt’s chest that burn him up inside. “I am going to find you a medic, but I will return before – ”

Newt’s hands, finally beginning to cooperate, fly up and seize Hermann by the wrist.

“Not medic,” Newt rasps. “Stacker.”

Hermann’s expression is equal parts relief and perplexity, but he nods dutifully and struggles to his feet. 

“I will return with him immediately. Do not move.”

Hermann looks like he wants to say something more, but he thinks better of it, picks up his cane, and hurries away before Newt can even think to say ‘thank you.’ He tries not to bleed into this cup of water as he slowly comes back to this world.

\---

“Do you really mean that,” Hermann questions, following Pentecost out of the lab and back into the cavernous hallways of the Shatterdome, “about Doctor Geiszler initiating a second drift?”

Pentecost swings around to face him, face sullen, his eyes conveying an emotion that his clipped tone does not. 

“Whatever it takes, Doctor. Don't you agree?” 

Hermann salutes. “Yes, sir.”

And it's in that moment that Hermann formulates a wild, terrible thought, borne from duty or idiocy or love or God knows what else.  _If I drifted alongside..._

But it's not until hours later that that thought finds its inevitable, spectacular completion in a wet, decimated back alley. Hermann thinks about finding Newton's pulse, racing, skin burning hot, as he pulls off the pons in their shared lab. Newt thinks about their first written correspondences, tentative but beguiling. He thinks about the photo portrait Hermann sent him in the mail in 2016 that Newt slipped into his wallet, behind his money, and never removed. They clasp hands.

\---

It works. They stop the clock. The breach is sealed. Raleigh gasps for air, and Mako embraces him. 

Newt throws a triumphant, companionable arm around Hermann’s shoulders but it is nothing compared to the shocking, immediate intimacy of their shared drift.

They do not separate for the rest of the night. They are shuffled from person to person, shaking hands, murmuring, “thank you” and “it was nothing” and “congratulations” and “I’m so sorry” in turn, clasping hands when things become too overwhelming.

At some point, alcohol is procured, but Newt and Hermann both politely refuse in turn. Hermann’s head is full of the memory of Newt, violently sick on the porch of an MIT frat, desperately trying to hide from his graduate students. Newt recalls, in a stomach-turning flash, drinking too much red wine at a family gathering in Bavaria, his father droning on and on about ‘wasting his life away’, the rest of the family sitting in stiff, awkward silence and averting their eyes.

_His father? Hermann’s father. Whose head is this, anyway?_

Newt is snapped out of his half-remembered reverie by Tendo clapping him heartily on the shoulder.

“It’s over, brother,” he beams. “It’s over.”

“It’s over,” Newt repeats, numbly. 

Hermann’s focus is on him immediately. He politely excuses himself from a conversation and crosses the short distance to Newt’s side.

“Newton,” he says firmly, pining Newt’s gaze just as the room starts to go bleary around the edges of his vision. “Let’s step outside.”

Hermann escorts him out by the arm, sidestepping the constant stream of colleagues and well-wishers and vaguely familiar men and women in uniform who touch their shoulders and smile as they pass. Newt just stares ahead and tries to focus on not passing out. 

Hermann guides them into the hallway, tucked into an alcove away from the hectic clamor behind them.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Can you talk?” Hermann chatters, snapping his fingers in an attempt to get Newt to focus.

“It’s over,” is Newt’s numb repetition. It hits Newt like a ton of bricks, and he physically recoils. It’s ten years of sleepless nights. Countless hours in tattoo parlors erecting self-worn shrines to the things that defined him. A lifetime of study, of celebration, of challenge, shutting itself off like the resolute _thud_ of a textbook slamming shut. 

Newt doesn’t remember when he began to sob, his breath erratic and painful in his chest, but he comes back to himself in time to become aware of Hermann’s arms tucked tightly around his body.

“It’s over,” Newt weeps into the crook of Hermann’s neck, and the knowledge that Hermann comprehends both _very_ disparate meanings of that phrase crackles between them almost palpably. It’s a celebration. It’s a lament.

“I know,” Hermann whispers soothingly into Newt’s mussed hair, just above his ear. He squeezes him firmly, grounding him. 

In time, Newt’s chest unconstricts. He unclenches his hands from where they fisted, desperately, in the fabric of Hermann’s jacket. Hermann pulls away slowly and asks with a remarkable lack of condescendence,

“Better now?” 

“Better,” Newt hiccups in reply.

Newt’s head is full of memories of himself – of himself through Hermann’s eyes – tinged with equal frustration and fondness. He can’t even begin to imagine what surprising new emotions Hermann sees of himself through the lens of Newt’s memories.

 _Respect_ , Newt ventures to guess. _Gratitude.  
_

Newt touches the skin beneath Hermann’s red, blood-burst eye tenderly.

“We match,” he comments, hoping Hermann knows he means _thank you_.

Hermann returns the gesture with equal lightness.

“I suppose we do,” he replies, contemplatively. His long fingers, dry and cold, brush dirt away from Newton’s forehead, careful not to touch the wound there. “You’re not hurt, are you?” 

“No,” Newt answers, his voice catching as Hermann continues to clean his face and straighten his hair with agonizing gentleness. “Are you?”

“No.”

Hermann smiles, almost mischievously.

“We live to see another day, Newton.”

Newt nods resolutely, trying not to feel absolutely overcome with emotion yet again. 

“It is precisely what we deserve,” Hermann concludes. Newt smiles. Somewhere, down the hall, the distant sounds of cheering and glasses toasting. 

\---

"It's strange," Hermann muses aloud nearly a week later, stirring idly at his soup. "I truly can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't running." 

Newt smiles at him from across the cafeteria table and thinks,  _you get it, man. You always did._  

And it could be the lingering connection of their drift, or perhaps just a lifetime of mutual understanding, but Hermann's brief, gracious nod is enough for Newt to know that the sentiment is received and deeply felt. 

\--- 

Job offers flood in immediately. The two doctors spend hours in the lab sifting through the influx of paper mail and email to compare offers, seeing which academic and laboratory-based institutions offer them joint tenure. When they do not immediately reply, more offers appear with even more lavish benefits, more freedom, more prestige.

They both are filled with an inexplicable dread that leaves Hermann feeling ashamed and Newt feeling antsier than ever. 

It turns out being a hero means the world continues to let you do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want to do it.

Hermann graciously accepts a few awards and conducts interviews, some even on-camera. Newt fights admirably with Hermann’s cowlick before standing in the wings and watching Hermann fidget nervously under the lights; never quite comfortable but still able to field questions with a succinct, polite deftness that mystifies Newt. They always manage to wrangle Newt into the last few minutes of the segment, much to Hermann’s chagrin and Newt’s barely-concealed delight.

Newt’s a bona fide _rock star_ , after all.

He jokes around companionably with interviewers. Stops for pictures on the street. Signs old copies of CDs his college band put out almost ten years ago. He attends galas and premieres and award ceremonies. He is flown around the world and people toast him and he gives hilarious, inspiring speeches and people clasp his shoulder and call him “friend” even though he knows, like he’s always known, they’re just admirers. Newt drinks too much and stumbles back to his room where Hermann is always awake just across the hall, waiting for him.

“Seems like you must have had a good time,” Hermann admonishes sarcastically, even as he helps Newt out of his suit jacket and tie and ushers him into bed. They’ve become so physical, so tactile, so alarmingly free of the boundaries they erected so many years ago. Neither of them will talk about it, fearing that examining it too closely will somehow add judgment and perspective back into the equation and it will skitter away for good, like the too-fast silver flash of fish in a pond.

Hermann leaves a cold glass of water on Newt’s nightstand. Newt vaguely remembers bleeding into one not too long ago.

 _Don’t go_ , Newt thinks at the back of Hermann’s head as he turns to leave the room. _I’m not asking you to go._

“Goodnight, Newton,” Hermann says as he closes Newt’s door and shuts off the light.

 _You’re not asking him to stay, either_ , his brain thinks back, disparagingly. 

\---

Hermann keeps him tethered to reality in a world that world that becomes staggeringly false.

What began as awe-struck fans, _admirers_ , soon become invasive reporters, stalkers, people who speculate and pry and harass his uncle over the phone for photos and follow Hermann because he’s slower. 

The world is safe, but now there is time, now there is _doubt_ , and questioning turns nasty: why didn’t you drift with a Kaiju brain sooner? How do you know we’re _really_ safe? Don’t you care to talk about the nature of your relationship with Doctor Gottlieb? 

Raleigh and Mako disappeared long ago, and Hansen divulges, over a late-night beer, that if he didn’t have a Shatterdome to properly decommission, he would have been long-gone as well.

Newt doesn’t know how to ask Hermann to disappear with him. Luckily, he doesn’t have to agonize over it for long.

Hermann’s family has a house in Bavaria, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, near the Alps along the Austrian border. It has been empty for years – all the Gottliebs living in various parts of the world, none with children or spouses to inherit the property quite yet. It sits secluded in the mountains, the kind of placewhere people grow old in peace. 

Hermann doesn’t need to ask more than once. Newt tries to be facetious, tries to pretend this isn’t a frighteningly important moment in both of their lives, that this isn’t just a more discreet way of asking _please never leave me again for the rest of your life._

“I thought you’d never ask,” Newt jokes, waggling his eyebrows. 

It is no joke.

Hermann quickly, inconspicuously, secures travel plans.

\---

Ten years of belongings are strewn across Hermann’s room. Lab equipment sits half-packaged, files yet to be sorted properly, Newt’s clothing in disarray half in-and-out of bags. 

It’s 4am, and Hermann and Newt are leaving for Bavaria in less than six hours. 

Newt looks up from his packing and spots Hermann re-folding some of Newt’s dress shirts for him, engaged in the task with a rare, serene look on his surprisingly youthful face. Newt realizes with sudden, shocking clarity that he will never leave Hermann, regardless of whether or not Bavaria is their final destination. Newt knows Hermann holds the same belief. An imaginary lifetime plays out before him instantly. One he desperately wants, maybe has always wanted, and is terrified to realize he can have so long as he _just_

_doesn’t_

_fuck it up…_

Newt’s suddenly can’t focus on folding anymore.

 _Thanks brain_ , Newt thinks back, screwing his eyes shut. _Thanks a lot._

“I don’t want to do this to you,” Newt whispers hoarsely, unable to look Hermann in the eye. “I don’t want you to make a mistake.”

Hermann crosses over and slowly, carefully, kneels down beside him. He tangles his fingers in Newton’s hair and sighs, world-weary, into his neck as he resolves, 

“This is no mistake.”

“Goddamn,” Newt laughs, shakily. “I'm trying to self-destruct here, Hermann. Stop throwing yourself onto the metaphorical bomb.”

But Hermann just shakes his head and repeats, seriously,

“This is no mistake.”

Newt turns his head and sees that Hermann’s eyes are glassy from exhaustion, from fondness, from _desire_. Newt licks his lips, terrified, elated.

They kiss for the first time.

\---

They travel the next day, hurried and badly disguised, nervous the entire time and staring pointedly straight ahead whenever a stranger's gaze lingers for too long. But the cabin in the mountains welcomes them with quiet and solitude - the kind of place where you can only hear birds in the morning, and neighbors don't pry, and phone reception is spotty, at best.

It is bliss. They read, they cook, they bird watch, they co-publish papers, they learn how to be intimate and adventurous. They find kind neighbors who do not spy or interfere. Hermann is a wonder with the local children – an unending well of patience and good stories. Newt wonders how he possibly went so long without imagining this could possibly be the life he wanted, the life he _could have_.

Newt wakes often to find Hermann already up, sitting on the porch overlooking Zugspitze, bundled up in blankets and blowing steamy breath lazily over a mug of hot coffee. Newt finds his place next to him – the only place he would like to be – and accepts a squeeze of the hand that conveys all of the gratitude and relief and affection that words cannot begin to muster.

There are minor setbacks: Hermann leaves for a week to discuss a thesis with an old colleague and Newt, bored, scared, lonely, desperate, feeling useless and washed-up and sequestered away, tries to breath through his three-day panic attack. He breaks plates because he likes the way it sounds, remembers how good it felt back in 2013 throwing them out the window at MIT and shouting at the top of his lungs. It doesn’t feel as good this time, knowing Hermann won’t even be angry with him. Hermann rarely is.

Then, Hermann has a period where his nose won’t stop bleeding. Panicked, they drive hours to the nearest specialist and they spend a week in and out of the hospital, running every test imaginable. Hermann grows weak and anemic. His hands develop a permanent tremor. His skin blanches such a pallid shade of white that the exhausted bags under his eyes look bruised and blue. Newt hides in the hospital bathroom and nearly pulls his own hair out it’s so unimaginably, poetically _unfair_ that after a lifetime of reckless, idiotic, self-destructiveness _Hermann_ is going to be the one who dies young.

Newt never planned on that. It doesn’t even seem possible.

Hermann pulls through, however. Newt cocoons the man in blankets and drives him home the three hours to Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

“Maybe we need to live a little closer to civilization,” Newt suggests tentatively, kissing Hermann’s long fingers as he helps him out of the car.

Hermann wraps an arm around Newt’s midsection and the two limp slowly up the path towards their house.

“Perhaps,” Hermann acquiesces, out of breath. 

\--- 

“I hope you like Boston,” Newt chatters nervously, throwing his sweaters into a suitcase. “I mean, I think you will. I pretty much _know_ you will. Museums. Fall foliage. Rivers to sit by. Academia teeming around you, ready to suck your metaphorical dick…”

“Newton!” Hermann chastises sharply, but he’s laughing. He has a harder time folding as precisely now, his hands always quivering just a little. Newt takes the shirt from him and folds it, just the way he knows Hermann likes. Hermann kisses him, just behind his ear, and whispers,

“And if I don’t like it – or _you_ don’t like it – we’ll leave. Together.”  
  
“Yeah,” Newt affirms. “Yeah, man. We will.”

Newton Geiszler never imagined himself a long and happy life. He was content, for once, to be proven wrong.


End file.
